And so, here am I in Wisconsin for the month
of June. Working full time and visiting with my family. What a
treat, my niece is getting married and it's a great time to be
here.
I forgot about how big the storms can be here. On
Saturday, there was a rip roaring one that tore through the
region.
It was a humid, windy night.
There I was in my brother's kitchen on the top floor of
his duplex. The radio was on and I was listening to my
favorite radio program, A Prairie Home Companion. My brother
was away, lucky thing, too.
I had shelf paper all over and one by one I was scrubbing
out his kitchen cabinets, wiping down all the handles and
laying the new paper. White with a blue and gray marbling
motif. He is a guy after all and I told the woman at Ace
Hardware that I didn't want flowers.
Over my shoulder, out the window, the cracks of
lightening lit up the night sky and showed the branches
on the leafy maple in the backyard swaying crazily in the
wind. I was cozy though and safe from the storm and after
a few hours in between the emergency weather warnings on the
radio, I had it all down and the kitchen felt sparkling clean.
I even laid paper under the sink in the bathroom as an added
bonus.
The next day when Jim came home, he said, "Wow! I've
lived here 20 years and that's never been done."
"I even found buried treasure under the kitechen sink," I
said, "A blue towel that I threw in the washing
machine."
"That's not mine," Jim said. "Oh," I said. I didn't want
to think about that too much. We took it to the Goodwill later
that afternoon.
Then my sister called and we told her, what I had done.
"Oh great!" she said, "Can you do my linen closet when you
come over on Friday?"
When Jim and I watched the news, it turned out to be the
worst storm in the region for 30 years. Houses washed away and
a lake disappeared into the Wisconsin river.
